IT IS entirely possible
that someone other than Errol
Morris could have decided to make a
nonfiction film about an oddly likable
developer of "humane" execution devices
who, based on his own utterly dubious
science, goes on to gain international
fame as a Holocaust denier.

And it's conceivable that someone with
a particularly macabre sense of the absurd
could have even dreamed up Fred
A. Leuchter Jr., an earnest dweeb
with a thick Massachusetts accent and a
fondness for death chamber technology, who
drinks 40 cups of coffee and smokes six
packs of cigarettes a day, meets his
wife-to-be at the local Dunkin' Donuts and
then jets off with her to Auschwitz,
and is partial to comments like, "Every
time there's a gas execution, it's an
accident waiting to happen."

Still
"Mr. Death: The
Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter
Jr.," Mr. Morris's new film,
which opens Wednesday (an alternative
title, briefly considered, was "Honeymoon
at Auschwitz"), seems so much the
quintessential Morris project -- with its
mix of death and humor, the goony and the
profound -- that even Mr. Morris gets a
little nervous talking about it, and not
just because of the political sensitivity
of the subject matter.

"I have this tendency to
overintellectualize what I do," Mr. Morris
said, at the downtown Manhattan studio
where he makes commercials when he's not
turning out his own blend of ("don't call
them documentaries") nonfiction films like
"The Thin Blue Line," the investigation of
the murder of a Dallas policeman; "A Brief
History of Time," about the cosmologist
Stephen Hawking, and "Fast, Cheap
and Out of Control," a profile of four
amiable obsessives.

"But I like least of all explicating
this one," he said. "Don't get me wrong. I
can and will babble on about it. But I
prefer to have people look at it and see
what they make of it, in the way I did it
thinking: 'What am I doing? What am I
really doing? It's no accident, after all,
that two people obsessed with death,
namely me and Fred Leuchter, end up in
Auschwitz, Leuchter, Fred Leuchter,
Leuchter Report, the epicenter of 20th-
century death."

Mr. Morris is 51, with graying hair and
a chunkier frame than when he first became
well known with "The Thin Blue Line." He
grew up in Hewlett, on Long Island, where
his father, a doctor, died when he was 2
years old, and his mother, a
Juilliard-trained music teacher, raised
him to be a concert cellist. He went to
science-fiction films like "This Island
Earth" and "Creature From the Black
Lagoon" with his Aunt Rosalind,
studied history at the University of
Wisconsin and enrolled in a doctoral
program in philosophy at the University of
California at Berkeley, where he worked
toward a Ph.D. that he never quite
finished.

But he soon gravitated toward film and,
in particular, interviews with the
eccentric, the marginal and the sometimes
dangerous. Before long, he had more or
less invented a hybrid form that treats
nonfiction events and real people in a way
that mixes sober interviews with sometimes
surreal re-enactments. It is to the
conventional documentaries of, say, the
Burns brothers as Chagall is to
Grant Wood.

Fans of Mr. Morris's intensely odd,
cerebral films will find themselves on
stylistically familiar terrain in "Mr.
Death." Mr. Morris's films, at their
heart, are about, to use a ridiculously
overblown word from his philosophy days,
epistemology -- the nature of knowledge:
what things are and what they seem to be,
how people know what they think they know,
and do they really know it or just think
they know it? His main device is simply to
sit his subjects in front of a device he
invented called the Interretron, a two-way
mirror that allows a subject to speak into
the camera while seeing Mr. Morris's face.
It's not entirely clear whether people
respond to the process or to Mr. Morris's
disarming absent-minded-professor persona.
But whether it's the people in "Gates of
Heaven" babbling on about the pet cemetery
business or the bizarre cast of "The Thin
Blue Line," in which the only honest man
is a a drifter wrongly convicted of a
murder he did not commit, his subjects
tend to natter on endlessly as if injected
with some sort of truth serum.

AT his best, the end result is work
that's one part Freud, one part
William James and one part the Marx
Brothers. Or, as someone once suggested, a
cross between "60 Minutes" and "The
Twilight Zone."

"I've always believed that people
construct for themselves some kind of
world they live in that they reveal
through language," Mr. Morris said. "So
putting people in front of a camera and
letting them talk is a way of creating a
kind of interior monologue, a monologue
about self, and people always say really
surprising things. In "The Thin Blue
Line," one witness, Emily Miller,
says: 'Everywhere I go, there's murders,
even around my house.' It tells us a lot
about Emily Miller. Not that everywhere
she goes there are murders, but that she
sees herself as a protagonist in a crime
drama. She is living in some whacked-out
Boston Blackie movie."

In "The Thin Blue Line," Mr. Morris's
1988 account of the Texas murder case, the
interviews and his own sleuthing solved a
murder that sent the wrong man, Randall
Dale Adams, to Death Row and set the
real killer, David Harris, free to
kill again. This time his subject is much
more weighty. He's trying to solve the
mystery of the Holocaust: not did it
happen, but how could it happen? And the
answer, subject to a million different
interpretations, lies in the passionately
matter-of-fact stream of verbiage pouring
out of Mr. Leuchter's mouth.

Mr. Leuchter, whose story unfolds like
a mixture of something out of Vladimir
Nabokov and Kurt Vonnegut, grew
up the son of a Massachusetts correction
officer. As an adult, he developed the
ultimate niche business in Malden, Mass.,
designing and repairing execution chambers
for the states that have capital
punishment. His goal, he says, is to make
them more humane rather than faulty
electric chairs, which he says, torture
their victims while "cooking the meat." He
proposes, for example, a lethal-injection
chamber more like a dentist's office with
a contoured chair, television and perhaps
pictures on the wall (the film posits a
peaceful scene out of Currier & Ives)
rather than a gurney and bare walls. It's
a career, he explains in a spectacularly
unconvincing observation, much like any
other. "There is no difference between a
life-support system and an execution
system," he allows, adding the subtle
proviso, "except that if a life-support
system fails you die, and if an execution
system fails you live."

For the first third of the film we're
in the eerie but vaguely terrestrial realm
of Mr. Leuchter's death-implement
business. But in the 1980's, Mr. Leutcher
found himself a central figure in a far
darker drama. He was hired by a neo-Nazi
named Ernest Zünder,
[sic]
author of tracts with titles like
"The Hitler We Loved
and Why," to disprove the existence
of the Holocaust. In February 1988, Mr.
Leuchter took off for Poland, where
in a stunning act of
desecration, he used a hammer and
chisel to knock off pieces of the walls of
crematoria, which were later subjected to
chemical analysis that found no traces of
cyanide. From this, he deduced, in a
report hailed by Holocaust deniers around
the world, that the Holocaust never
happened. The report, distributed over the
Internet and disseminated by neo-Nazi
groups, made him famous in a shadow world
but ruined him in his own. Hounded by
critics, he lost his business, and his
marriage eventually fell apart.

As the film
explains, the science of the study was
thoroughly flawed, and even the chemist
who did the analysis of the fragments
told
Mr. Morris
that the findings were meaningless. It
turned out that most of the surfaces
Mr. Leutcher had used had been
dismantled, dynamited and subjected to
the elements in a way that made them
useless for analysis. Besides, cyanide
gas, if any existed, would have
penetrated less than a hairbreadth
beneath the surface of the walls. So
when Mr. Leuchter took samples by
gouging out chunks of the walls, he
diluted his sample by upward of 10,000
times, Mr. Morris said.

Mr. Morris demolishes the spurious
science of the report almost as an aside.
And in the end what really intrigues him
is not Mr. Leuchter's report but Mr.
Leuchter's mind.

"Not that I wear a hat, but if I did,
as a practitioner of this particular form,
I would take my hat off to Fred for being
such a worthy subject," Mr. Morris said.
"So when Fred talks about painless
executions, you have to wonder, what's
going on here? What can he mean? And when
he goes to Auschwitz, Leuchter, Fred
Leuchter, Leuchter Report, the job he's
least qualified of all to do, and comes
back thinking that somehow he had
irrefutable knowledge, that he has the
truth, you have a study in hubris and
vanity that you could not make up. My
question for Fred was, 'Do you ever think
you might be wrong?' and his answer was
very interesting. He doesn't say, 'No.' He
says, 'I'm long past that.' "

Mr. Morris, of course, would be a
perfect subject for his own movies, not
just because he's such a good talker but
because he's such an expressive one. He
speaks in eloquent bursts, usually
punctuated at the end by a quick, bemused
snort. The snort is followed by a pause,
and then another verbal excursion.

"I get myself in trouble when I say I
like Fred, because that needs to be
followed by various qualifiers that I can
find him sympathetic and likable but find
his work not at all sympathetic or
likable, but I almost see him as a lovable
idiot. He's like a character out of
Nabokov, who pioneered the technique of
the clueless narrator. But the real
question about the film is something that
goes back to Plato. Do people have
evil in their hearts, or do they do
sometimes commit truly despicable acts
while convincing themselves they're good?
It's the reason the Eichmann
trial, to mention the obvious example,
became such a watershed.

"So Fred seems himself in various ways.
He sees himself as a humanitarian, the
Florence Nightingale of Death Row,
the man who took the ouch out of the death
penalty. He's a concerned citizen, seeker
of truth, civil libertarian. Who would
speak for people like Zündel if not
him? Finally, he sees himself as
ultimately a Christlike figure, hounded
and persecuted and reviled, as he sees it,
because of his inherent goodness and
correctness."

This, of course, is very sensitive
terrain, so sensitive the film almost did
not get made. Mr. Morris conducted his
interviews with Mr. Leuchter in 1992, and
they sat around for five and a half years
because no one wanted to finance the
project. Mr. Morris recognizes that his
film gives voice to ideas usually not
given a public forum.

"I don't think
this movie suggests in any way that
Fred's ideas are sympathetic, because
obviously I don't," said Mr. Morris,
who is Jewish and who lost relatives in
the Holocaust. "But I do think
Holocaust denial is something worthy of
examination. The Holocaust itself is
worthy of examination. It's the
epicenter of evil in our century. It
was unfathomably evil, but looking at
it is a good thing rather than a bad
thing. And Holocaust denial, in my
view, is an alternative route into the
Holocaust."

Mr. Morris has many other alternative
routes in mind for the future, many of
them projects that have been percolating
for years, like "Weirdo," about the
breeding of a giant chicken, or "Insanity
Inside Out," the story of a man who was
wrongly committed by his parents to a
mental institution until freed by the
Supreme Court. ("The tagline," he said,
"is: 'You seek vindication from the
highest tribunal in the land, namely your
parents. When that fails, you go to the
Supreme Court.' ")

Mr. Morris is also preparing a
television series of interviews with the
famous and the nonfamous, in between doing
commercials, like an elliptical series on
real men for Miller Beer that is almost as
offbeat as his films. And he's hoping to
find a way to do a fiction film that works
the way his non-fiction ones do.

Whatever worries Mr. Morris may have,
running out of material is not one of
them.

"After doing this since the early 70's,
I think I've got good and bad news," he
said. "The bad news is that rationality is
the exception, not the rule. The good news
is, that works well for my art."